The Member of Parliament for Bunkpurugu, Dr. Abed Bandim, has bemoaned the difficulties that new registrants in the North East Region have been facing in the last few days that the limited registration exercise has been ongoing across the country.
According to him, many challenges have wrought the exercise, organised by the Electoral Commission of Ghana, with many still unable to get access to registration centers.
Sharing some of the challenges with GhanaWeb via a phone interview, Dr. Abed Bandim stressed that there have been challenges such as network challenges and particularly, distance to and from registration centers.
“The challenges we unravelled on the ground were very common. It was the same song that the registration officers kept on singing to us, except for some few places where they had peculiar challenges. The issue of network was very common in all the centers we toured. In fact, we experienced it ourselves because for the last week in Tamale, where we lodged, we had challenges where we could not at some points make calls, or use our data.
“And I took interest in the kinds of devices they were using because of my communications and IT background. I realised they were using the MTN WiFi devices that we all use in our various homes and challenges where communities have limited telecom connectivity, you can be sure that it would be more serious than other places, but all of them, including Tamale Central, faced network challenges,” he said.
Dr. Abed Bandim further explained that there have so far been challenges characterized by the rainy season, making the processes for the registration at many centers extremely difficult.
Also, he said this situation has forced many of the people who are eligible to be enrolled onto the voters register to use boats as a means of transport to the hard-to-reach registrations centers.
“Then the issue of rainfalls; this is a rainy season, and it rained almost every day. And in a day, it can rain two, three or four times and anytime it is raining, then the people have to stop because where they are, they cannot accommodate everybody in one room, or a hall for the registration to continue. So, there were rampant disruptions by the rainfalls. Another issue was the rain cutting off come local communities where rivers and streams were overflown and therefore, they couldn’t transport them to them to the registration centers.
“In some cases, particularly in Kpandai, they had to use boats to transport people and there are a lot of communities in that area. So, using boats to transport people on the other end and transporting them by tricycles and cars was not just an easy exercise at all. So, there are many people who are still unregistered, who are still cut off because they can’t get them to the registration centers,” he said.
Dr. Abed Bandim, together with other executives and leaders, visited places including Sagnarigu and Tamale North constituencies, where they both shared a common registration center; Mion, Yendi, Bimbilla, Wulensi, and his home constituency, Bunkpurugu.
Source: ghanaweb.com
